Many users, such as businesses, are using computing services that are provided from a remote service provider, such as a services provided by a distributed network environment (e.g., a cloud service). In an example, a utility company accesses a cloud computing environment in order to consume services provided by the cloud computing environment. For example, the utility company uploads meter read data, customer data, billing data, and/or a variety of other data to the cloud computing environment. Such data is stored within databases or other storage structures of the cloud computing environment. The utility company may invoke various services of the cloud computing environment to perform operations upon the data. For example, a billing service, operating within the cloud computing environment, is used to extract selected data from a database such as customer information data, meter read data, and energy rate data. The billing service provides billing functionality that processes the extracted data and generates bills that are emailed to customers.
There are services and functionality of the cloud computing environment that are accessed in real-time, such as billing information obtained by a customer support representative while handling a client call. In order to reduce network bandwidth, processing and storage sources, and/or overall system load, it is desirable to perform certain functionality at off-peak times (e.g., during the night or weekend). Such functionality is performed by batch jobs that can perform specified tasks if the computing system supports batch processing. A batch job is a computer program configured for a specific task that is compiled and executed without manual intervention.
Unfortunately, typical cloud computing environments do not host or provide application programming development environments, such as a Java integrated development environment (IDE). Thus, users cannot create applications such as batch jobs capable of performing tasks within the cloud computing environment.